Re: a basic query

Hi,

just some remarks from a by-stander (well, I'm working on mpg123, the
decoding side of the mp3 game).

Am Sat, 13 Oct 2012 20:07:48 +0530
schrieb carolene kingsleigh <[email protected]>: 

> also , why not eleminate all other
> useless frmats like flac and wav and ogg? they don't sould any different
> than even 128 kbps mp3 so why million formats and million settings and the
> question of incompatibility? 

That is a very broad issue and you can see that in other areas apart
from audio coding: You have many different ways to do things and people
explore these ways. In this particular field, though, mp3 does have the
burden of a pool of valid (but not justified IMHO:-/) patents covering
the technology. They are running out in these years, but the threat of
patent enforcement was one major driver in competing formats,
especially ogg (Vorbis).

Then, there are formats that are in principle more advanced, planned as
successors of mp3, even (MPEG 1 audio layer 3 ... there's MPEG 4 ...).
They have advantages like storing multiple channels for surround sound,
for example. Also, you can do better than mp3 at low bit rates. The
design of the codec is not perfect/optimal.

But, in practice, the format improved (like standard VBR operation now)
and LAME does an exellent job in producing mp3 that is transparent
sounding at moderate bit rates. I do usually use the standard preset
which likes to group complex music around 192 kbit/s. I guess I would
not miss much with decent VBR around 128 kbit/s. I agree that mp3 with
LAME is "good enough" for stereo music applications. It's universally
supported and gains with other formats are small compared to the bit
step of reducing the storage requirement from raw PCM audio (from 1411
kbit/s to 128-192 kbit/s is approaching factor 10).

FLAC is a different beast, as that stores the audio losslessly. It does
a bit of compression, but without changing anything in the signal. So,
for bit-for-bit archiving, it is a valid solution orthogonal to what
mp3 does. The point of mp3 is throwing away information;-)

You got ogg, aac, opus and others and they won't go away. Some are
redundant, some have different specialities. I also do not see mp3
going away, though (after music shops switched to DRM-free mp3 files,
as you point out with a bit excessive bit rate, but that's fine by me;
I can recompress to 128 average for the mobile player using current
LAME).

And: You should get used to competing standards all around. Just
consider: There are lots of formats even for storing uncompressed PCM!

>i want to do something in mp3 format but i
> dont know where to start (not just coding but also the business and stuff)
> so please reply back and make me a part of lame....

I'll let the proper LAME folks answer that one, but help in coding is
generally welcome. Documentation perhaps, too. LAME itself doesn't do
much "business" though, also because of the patent issue (it's a
research project you can use to build an encoder). You could collect a
definite data set about mp3-related patents and give us a reliable
count-down to the celebration of mp3 really becoming free;-)

> going in london in 2013 feb for my audio production degree in SAE
> institute.....can i do something in that and this?

Not sure how that would relate. Isn't SAE more about mixing / producing
recordings? Well, LAME comes in in the publication / marketing stage.
You could do some evaluation of different encoder settings, investigate
issues of whether to publish 44100 or 48000 kHz mp3s ... benefits of
exporting to 24 bit / 23 bit sample format for mp3 conversion instead
of creating those from a 16 bit mix-down for CD ...


Alrighty then,

Thomas

PS:  When starting a new topic, try to write a fresh mail to lame-dev
(just clicking on the list address should do the trick) instead of
replying to the digest you got, that makes grouping of discussions
easier and also doesn't automatically include that whole batch of text
after your message.

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